Last night, spent some time with latest jujuc-core in saucy, was interested with local provider support which was added recently. Couple of things worth to be known:
1 juju-core now use mongodb to replace zookeeper, so to play with local provider, you need install lxc, mongodb. I have whishlist against juju-core packaging for providing a meta package to install those dependencies.
2 After install mongodb, do remember to stop the server manually, because juju bootstrap will create its own upstart scripts to handle start/stop the service.
3 The configuration of local provider is quite simple now, you may copy and paste the one by running juju init, not need modify anything, I did comment out root-dir, which made me run into .
4 Two commands need to be run with sudo, one is bootstrap, the other is destroy-environment.

To set up a lab at home, I need a openflow compatible swtich, was thinking about buy a netfpga, seems its not cost effective. Then turn to find a router which can be flashed with openwrt, this approach make more sense for me. Searched from taobao, I got a buffalo’s wzr-hp-300np, which has a decent specs.
4 x 1GHz lan port
32M flash and 64M RAM.
Its supported since openwrt’s 10.03 release, so latest release can be flashed too, even the trunk release, if you want to try with 3.10.1 version of kernel.
It comes with buffalo’s stock rom, the one I got is actually a Japanese release, which means you can’t flash openwrt directly, because of the bootloaded has been locked to refuse flash non-japanese firmware, tricky here is you can flash dd-wrt by using buffalo’s web flash tool, then you can flash openwrt from within dd-wrt. Not too bad.
To use openwrt, you may choose a release from their website or you may build it from trunk, no matter which one you choose, you need set up a openwrt build environment. Because there is no such a openvswitch binary package, so I’d build by myself.

Checkout from my branch, which was upgraded to build openvswitch-1.10.0 version.
https://github.com/zhengpenghou/openvswitch

And then follow instructions on openwrt to flash the image and install openvswitch’s package onto your router, your openflow compatible switch is ready. After boot up the switch, ssh into it, edit the network config accordingly.

Here is mine for your reference, each switch’s configuration differs from others.